Defending the Christian faith and promoting its wisdom against the secular and religious challenges of our day.

Monday, July 16, 2012

Freedom, Family, Sexual License and Fulfillment

What is freedom? We tend to understand freedom and liberty
as an absence of limitations. However, if we just consider this notion for a
bit, it falls apart.

Life is a game of chess. If you play chess without rules or
limitations – if you can move any piece in any way, whenever you want – the game
becomes entirely meaningless. Life is the same way. Every move or decision is
not the same. Each carries with it its own particular costs. Jumping off a building
is not the same as jumping into a swimming pool. It costs us dearly! Instead,
we maximize our freedom as we live according to certain laws or principles that
are consistent with our nature and goals.

Just consider a goldfish confined in his tank. Now imagine
that he sees the great world through the glass in his tank and grows
increasingly displeased with his fishly limitations. Determined that he will
not live with this confinement, with a great show of strength and courage, he
propels himself out of his tank and flops helplessly about on the waterless
floor of his freedom.

Perhaps our lives are the same way, and we disdain the
limitations that actually maximize our freedom and well-being. Perhaps there
are inherent limitations in the area of family and human sexuality. Perhaps we
too must pay a hefty cost when we jump out of our fishbowl.

Indian scholar Vishal Mangalwadi points to an unexpected
cost of sexual libertarianism – an inevitable and severe backlash:

Our
[Indian] neighbors could not even refer to their wives by their names. A
wife was Bhitarwali – the one
who belongs indoors. Women’s enslavement was then sold as traditional
morality. The consequence? Not one girl in our village had gone beyond the
fifth grade because the nearest middle school was three miles away. It was
too risky to send a girl far out of sight…What they considered morality
was, in fact, our women’s slavery. (The
Book that Made your World, 277)

How did such “slavery” come about? Why would parents treat
their daughters in such a repressive manner? And husbands, their wives?
Mangalwadi explains that this repression was the result of sexual
permissiveness. He refers to a Hindu temple in that vicinity which gives
testimony to an age sexual libertarianism:

Every
imaginable sexual act had been carved in stone to adorn Hindu temples. My
ancestors’ religion of “sacred sex” had enslaved our women just as it did
in the pre-Christian Greco-Roman civilization. (277)

Sexual libertarianism inevitably leads to abuse. This is generally
followed by a repressive reaction, which can imprison women for centuries. It
also leads to a disdain of women, even among the most “liberated.” Mangalwadi
claims that:

Rousseau
– one of the fathers of secular enlightenment and a champion of liberty –
believed that woman was unfinished man. Hindu sages taught that a soul
with poor karma incarnated as a female to serve males.

Mangalwadi also quotes from Swami Sivananda, the founder of
the Divine Life Society regarding the
backlash against “Kama Sutra” and other forms of sexual “liberation”:

Sex-pleasure
is the most devitalizing and demoralizing of pleasures. Sexual pleasure is
no pleasure at all. It is a mental delusion. It is false, utterly
worthless, and extremely harmful (287)

Celibacy had become proof of “spiritual superiority,” and it
entailed a diminuation of women. Although today’s non-theists – anything but
celibates - tend to blunt their negative and materialistic appraisals of the
female sex, their behavior seems to convey something else:

As
skeptics, atheists and humanists prepare to gather for their largest
meeting in Las Vegas
this weekend, attendance by women is expected to be down significantly. Officials
for The Amazing Meeting, or TAM, said Wednesday (July 11) that women would
make up 31 percent of the 1,200 conference attendees, down from 40 percent
the year before. A month before the conference, pre-registration was only
18 percent women, organizers said…Online forums have crackled with charges
of sexism…In June, Rebecca Watson, a skeptic blogger and speaker, canceled
her TAM appearance because, she said on her blog, she does “not feel
welcome or safe.” Other nontheists -- both male and female -- have shared
stories of unwanted sexual attention at nontheist gatherings, including
propositions for sex and unwelcome touching…Meanwhile, two more
skeptic/feminist bloggers announced they will not attend TAM.

One feminist skeptic even responded with the previously
unspeakable – she’d rather associate with Christians!

As one thinks, so too does he live! If the female is no more
than a material object and life has no more meaning that self-gratification,
why then not make use of the physical “resources” at one’s disposal!

Every
two years undergraduate students at Yale university are invited to two
weeks of pornography, porn stars, fetishes, sex toys and sex talks, all in
the name of the university’s infamous “Sex Week.”

However, what started as “liberation” has turned into abuse
and now a university crackdown:

The
clamp down on Sex Week follows several years of heightening controversy surrounding
the event, compounded by a formal complaint filed by 16 students alleging
a “hostile sexual atmosphere” on campus characterized by pervasive
harassment and assault.

Perhaps ironically, “liberation” comes at the cost of enslavement
- the objectification of the female. When sex is understood exclusively as
personal gratification, then the object of this gratification becomes little
more than an object.

Mangalwadi explains the repressive veiling of Muslim women
as a reaction against libertarianism. The Prophet Mohammad had visited his
loyal follower and adopted son Zaid. Zaid wasn’t home, but his stunning wife
was. She later related to her husband how captivated Mohammad had been.
Therefore, the faithful Zaid divorced his wife so that Mohammad could marry
her.

Although initially Mohammad refused this offering of his son’s wife, conveniently, a subsequent
revelation (Sura 33.2 - 33.7) provided liberation from such an inconvenient restriction.
What was the result of this enhanced freedom? Mangalwadi concludes:

The
Islamic world learned that it was safer to cover your women’s beauty than
to be sorry. (280)

Mangalwadi also argues that the sexual freedom available
through polygamy and divorce also served to devalue the women. In contrast to
sexual “liberation,” sociologist Rodney Stark argues that:

A
major aspect of women’s improved status in the Christian subculture is
that Christians did not condone female infanticide…the more favorable
Christian view of women is also demonstrated in their condemnation of
divorce, incest, marital infidelity, and polygamy. As Fox put it, “fidelity,
without divorce, was expected of every Christian.”…Like pagans, early
Christians prized female chastity, but unlike pagans, they rejected the
double standard that gave pagan men so much sexual license. Christian men
were urged to remain virgins until marriage, and extramarital sex was
condemned as adultery. Chadwick noted that Christianity “regarded
unchastity in a husband as no less serious a breach of loyalty and trust
than unfaithfulness in a wife.” (The
Rise of Christianity)

Mangalwadi concludes:

I
believe the habits of India’s
heart (habits gaining ground in America since the 1960s) have
been at the root of the enslavement of our women and the stagnation of
Indian civilization. (281)

Indeed, what civilization has prospered as sexual “liberation”
has been widely practiced? Instead, we maximize our freedom and well-being as
we live in accordance with the physical laws. Perhaps this also applies to the
teachings of the Bible!